1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a line figure encoder for encoding figures primarily comprised of lines, such as drawings or maps, so as to facilitate registration of such figures to computers.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, much efforts has been made to develop computerized administration systems for figures primarily comprised of lines, such as logical circuit diagrams, architectural drafts, or maps, by encoding such figures in forms, for example, of vector data in order to register such figures to computers.
One conventional method for executing this registration of the figures is to specify each point on the figures and to represent the figures by the sets of coordinates of the specified points and to register these sets of coordinates as figure data to computers by means of a digitizer. In this method, it is necessary to specify quite a large number of points, and this aspect makes this method extremely inefficient.
Another conventional method for executing the registration of the figures is to record the figures in an image memory by means of an imaging device and to extract figure data automatically by methods of pattern recognition. In this method, there may be recognition errors when the figures include a segment appearing to be disconnected but intended to be connected (referred hereafter as a cut) or a segment appearing to be connected but intended to be disconnected (referred hereafter as a tie), and corrections of such errors require enormously cumbersome procedures.